Reluctantly Home(18)

Pip climbed into her bed, but instead of burying herself beneath the covers she propped herself up against the headboard and stared at her childhood, preserved shrine-like in this room. She felt eerily calm. In the space of six months, every aspect of a life she’d thought was secure and stable had collapsed or evaporated. So why wasn’t she crying? Where were the howling tears of anguish, the breast-beating and lamentations that she might have expected to follow such a catastrophic turn of events? Her eyes were dry. Apart from a pivot towards the philosophical, which had taken her by surprise but was not upsetting in itself, she felt fine.

But that couldn’t be right. She must be in shock or something, or maybe her precarious mental state had rendered her incapable of processing what had just happened. It was true that feeling numb had become something of a habit with her recently, but this felt different. This wasn’t a lack of emotional engagement due to trauma, like before. This was something closer to acceptance. Pip probed her emotional depths and found that she was okay. In fact, she was more than okay. She actually felt relieved. She now knew exactly where she stood. With Dominic gone from her life, there was absolutely nothing left.

She was empty, a vacuum, a void.





11


Pip didn’t sleep that night; she didn’t even try. She stayed where she was, propped up against the headboard, staring out at the dark night sky through her narrow window. It had been early evening when she retreated to her room, the faded chintzy curtains not yet pulled against the night, and so she had followed the progress of time by watching the colour of the sky slide through orangey-pink to midnight blue and back to pink again. Stars twinkled and then disappeared, and the moon, wafer-thin, slinked past on its inexorable path to the west.

At not long after three she heard the cockerel start up. When she had first come back to the farm he had woken her every morning. In London she slept through revellers and sirens and the clarion cries of endless burglar alarms without even stirring, and yet the plaintive crowing of one cockerel had cut through her sleep like a knife.

‘Call yourself a farmer’s daughter,’ her father had teased when she had complained about the bird and she had thought to herself, ‘Well, no, actually. I don’t call myself a farmer’s daughter – not to anyone that matters, anyway.’ But of course, she hadn’t said this to him. Whilst Pip didn’t want all and sundry knowing about her humble origins, the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt her father.

And now it was Saturday morning and the weekend was spread out in front of her like a fresh page in a notebook. Or a diary. The diary! In all the calamity of Dominic’s unexpected visit and its aftermath, she had totally forgotten about the diary. She’d had a plan for her weekend that had been temporarily blindsided. But now Dominic was gone – in all senses of the word – and so what better way of distracting herself from unwelcome thoughts about him than returning to Plan A and losing herself in someone else’s life for a while?

She flicked the duvet back and slipped her feet out of bed. She would sneak downstairs, retrieve the diary and bring it back to her room. But as soon as she opened her bedroom door, she could hear her mother’s voice calling out to her.

‘Is that you, Pip?’

Pip felt the familiar irritation grow. It was so claustrophobic. She couldn’t even breathe here without somebody noticing and wanting to make sure that she was doing it properly.

The voice was coming from the bathroom, where the door stood wide open. Her family had never had much of an issue with privacy, something that hadn’t worried Pip when she’d lived there and didn’t know any different, but it now felt overfamiliar.

‘I brought a plastic bag back with me last night. Do you know where it went?’ she asked, heading for the stairs.

‘With an old book in it? I put it in the dresser. I didn’t want Dom . . .’ Her mother stopped mid-sentence as she emerged from the bathroom, a threadbare towel barely covering her torso and her sandy-coloured hair hanging in dripping tails around her face. ‘I didn’t want the place looking untidy,’ she continued, her ruddy cheeks a shade pinker than usual.

‘It’s okay, Mum,’ Pip replied reassuringly. ‘I’ll be all right. Honestly. And it’s probably for the best. We’d been drifting for a while, and what with me being stuck here . . .’ She paused, changed direction. ‘Please don’t worry about me. I’m not about to fall apart or anything.’

The irony of this sentence almost made her laugh.

‘Good,’ replied her mother, although her expression was sceptical, as if she didn’t really believe what Pip had said. Pip wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, either. Could she really dismiss Dominic walking out on her quite so lightly? But then again, this wasn’t really her, was it? This was the shell of her, but her vital parts – her heart, her soul, the essence of who she was – had been placed in frozen suspension by the accident, leaving her incapable of normal responses.

There was an awkward pause as both women stood on the landing, each waiting for the other to speak.

Pip broke the moment. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll just go get the bag.’ And then she headed down the stairs before her mother could question her any further.

In the kitchen, Jez was at the table filling his flask from the huge teapot that her mother kept full for whoever might need a cuppa. Pip hovered in the doorway. She was still in the clothes that she’d spent all night in, her hair unbrushed and what was left of yesterday’s mascara no doubt smudged in black shadows beneath her eyes. It didn’t really matter what Jez thought of her, but something held her back. She didn’t want him to see her looking so dreadful.